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MEDIA, DIASPORA AND GENDER IDENTITY IN NATIONALISTIC SPACES: NEGOTIATING GENDER IN DIASPORIC CULTURAL AND LITERARY SPACES.
Baby Pushpa Sinha* Lalan Kishore Singh** This paper endeavors to study gender identity in the framework of the ideology of nationalism and its projections in media and literary texts. It analyses how masculinity and nationalism have always been parallel discourses in its exclusion or subordination of feminine roles in the constructions of the nation whether through its media projections or through literary texts.. The paper attempts to examine how these dominant discourses re-inscribe themselves in postcolonial ideologies of nationalism, especially India. It examines the effects of these discourses in creating stereotypes of feminine identities, which get further complicated in the context of migration and diasporic cultures. The nationalist discourse and the ideology of hegemonic masculinity are co-terminus, and both are of European lineage. Infact, as Mosse detects, the modern form of Western masculinity emerged at about the same time and place as modern nationalism. Mosse notes that nationalism 'was a movement which began and evolved parallel to modern masculinity ' in the West about a century ago. Modern masculinity is, according to him, a focus of all varieties of nationalist movements: The masculine stereotype was not bound to any one of the powerful political ideologies of the previous century. It supported not only conservative movements . . . but the workers ' movement as well; even Bolshevik man was said
*Assistant Professor, Dept. of English, Assam University, Silchar. **Assistant Professor, Dept. of English, Bodoland University, Kokrajahar. Vol.-II 3 Jan-June (Summer) 2010

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to be "firm as an oak." Modern masculinity from the very first was co-opted by the new nationalist movements of the nineteenth century (Mosse 1996: p. 7). Nationalist politics is a key site for 'accomplishing ' masculinity (Connell 1987) for several

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